a few weeks ago, i watched pixar's visually stunning 3-d animated film, finding nemo, unfold on the big screen. my mind wandered (only briefly, thoughit is an emotionally engaging film after all) back to 1993 when pixar was still selling consumer software. that's right, before the toys had a story, the bugs had a life, and the monsters got incorporated, steve jobs' pixar was making software for the masses.

as early as 1991, i'd been fiddling with command-line 3-d image-building applications like pov-ray that worked their magic using a technique called ray tracing. my recollection is that pov-ray came with a 3-inch-thick book and a disk containing the dos software. on the old sub-66-mhz 486 systems of the day, generating one image took roughly 40 minutes or more, depending on the amount of shadowing, reflection, and transparency. even so, the process was fun because you had to work the code before you could see your creation, and each run was like a roll of the dicewhat would the image look like this time?

a brief explanation of what creating 3-d imagery on the pc entails might be helpful here.

to create 3-d images, you first have to build a wireframe and model the objects (cones, spheres, cubes, rings, and other shapes) and maybe extrude them. then you need to position the objects in 3-d space, wrap images or simple textures around them, and apply lighting and effects, which should play off of the images just as in real life to create the impression of solid objects with or without reflective surface. finally, you position the cameras (to determine the view of the image you end up with), and in the case of animation, key-frame the object (set the points in space where you want the object to be at a given time). now you let the rendering software draw the scene or, for an animation, each frame (snapshot) of the 10 to 30 required to make 1 second of action. movies like finding nemo, shrek, and toy story contain millions of hours of this kind of work and took the heavy-duty processing power of vast server farms to render the fluid movies you see.

back in 1993, though, the state of pc 3-d animation wasn't a state at all; it was a tiny municipality with no town hall. pixar's introduction of the $299 3-d text-creation software, typestry, was the original town hall in that misbegotten municipality, and it led to the development of a full-blown city.

typestry was different than what i had seen in previous 3-d animation software. first of all, it was a windows 3.1, gui application that required virtually no text commands. you typed in your text, extruded it, selected a skin or texture, set the amount of reflectivity andvery unlike the process with pov-raychose the animation. the text could spin and move across the screen, all the while maintaining a realistic 3-d appearance. you even had the option of outputting still bmps, tgas and tiffs.

setting all this up in windows 3.1 was very easy, but my dx250 with 8mb of ram and a 20mb hard drive (i'm not exaggerating here) took all night to render a brief animation of the word "hello" rotating and moving from the bottom of the screen to the top and passing out of view. the application used pixar's powerful renderman engine, which created industry-leading images, but was dependent on the horsepower of the rendering pc. when i woke the next morning and ran the completed flc file, i was ecstatic. i know this level of technology sounds unimpressive now, but back then, it was a big deal.

the appearance of typestry 1.1 was followed, over the next three years, by a virtual flood of entry-level desktop 3-d applications priced from $200 to $800. windows 95 marked a real turning point for the market. there were 3d choreographer, 3d it, extreme 3d, poser, ray dream studio, simply 3d, trispectives, truespace, and more. there were so many choices that in november 1996, pc magazine did a major comparative roundup of them all. in fact, i managed it and was so into the market that i even wrote one of the reviews. we also covered the professional-level products, which at the time included 3d studio, lightscape, strata, and several others.

heading into 1994, pixar was still in the entry-level 3-d software game. while i had moved on to other applicationsmainly truespace and ray dream (3-d apps that did far more than text)i was anxiously awaiting the release of typestry 2. that wait would never end.

looking back in my contact database, i see a note that says i received the typestry 2 beta in december 1994. when i ran into a pixar pr representative at an industry trade show early the next year, she told me the sad news: pixar was getting out of the commercial software business. i was crestfallen. all along i had expected pixar to produce a suite of entry-level 3-d apps that would soundly beat all competitors. instead, in november of 1995, pixar released (along with new partner disney) toy story and changed the movie industry.

over the next two years, the entry-level desktop 3-d application market would experience a rapid deflationalmost as if pixar's exit had taken with it all the enthusiasm surrounding entry-level diy 3-d on the pc. one by one, 3-d apps disappeared or were gobbled up by competitors, renamed, and often simply killed. truespace remains, but the company's focus is now more on building custom plug-ins for vertical markets like the jewelry-making industry. there are other packages, notably carrara studio 2 (formerly ray dream studio), but the excitement is gone.

i'm not really sure why there's so little interest today in creating 3-d on the pc. pros still do it (more and more every day)but ordinary users? not so much. maybe that's because creating unreal worlds on the pc is no longer as interestingthanks to the ease of digital video editingas manipulating real ones.

and there's also the fact that what typestry and a string of others could do on the pc 7 to 10 years ago is no longer compellingit's mundane. right now i have some realistic-looking 3-d text floating and rotating on my screen that says "don't go there". it took me exactly 25 seconds to create.

About the Author

A 25-year industry veteran and award-winning journalist, Lance Ulanoff is the former Editor in Chief of PCMag.com.
Lance Ulanoff has covered technology since PCs were the size of suitcases, ?on line? meant ?waiting? and CPU speeds were measured in single-digit megahertz. He?s traveled the globe to report on a vast array of consumer and business... See Full Bio

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